Todd Blanche Will Promise Anything Republican Senators Ask

In February 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing the White House Faith Office, which “advises” the administration on religion-adjacent policy initiatives and is led by a televangelist who has publicly compared Trump to Jesus Christ. In late July, the office held a conference call with Todd Blanche, Trump’s attorney general nominee, during which Blanche detailed his plans to use the power of the Justice Department to restrict abortion rights. Listeners were informed that the call was “not intended for press purposes” and “not on the record,” and the host instructed any reporters listening to hang up.

This is, to put it gently, not at all how attribution works. Please, if you take one thing from this newsletter, let it be this: “Off the record” is an agreement between a source and a journalist. It is not a series of magic words that renders journalists powerless to report whatever ill-advised things you say, or, for that matter, whatever ill-advised things you already said.

Further thwarting the White House’s harebrained bid for confidentiality is the fact that shortly after Blanche wrapped, Intercessors For America, a religious activist group, uploaded a recording of the event to its YouTube channel. That recording has since been removed, I assume at the behest of the first White House press staffer who typed “is YouTube off the record” into ChatGPT and realized that they had an opsec problem on their hands.

A recap of the call published by Politico makes clear why organizers hoped to keep the substance a secret. Blanche, a former member of Trump’s criminal defense team, acknowledged that the White House’s anti-abortion agenda is “taking longer than we want” to implement, but assured listeners that the goal remains the same: to make “the Dobbs decision…permanent in every single state.” With respect to abortion pills, which under federal law remain broadly available by mail even in states where Republicans have passed abortion bans, Blanche affirmed that the Justice Department was working on “putting practices and policies in place” to cut off that access, too.

“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said, according to Politico.

Between his dubious qualifications, his involvement in Trump’s pro-January 6 “anti-weaponization” fund, and his alarmingly obsequious declarations of fealty to his most famous client, Blanche has a somewhat more challenging path to confirmation than one might expect for a Republican lawyer appointed by a Republican president subject to the consent of a Republican-controlled Senate. Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski’s announcement on Friday that she will vote no on Blanche—“I simply do not have confidence,” she wrote, that he would “check the worst impulses of this administration”—means that in order to get the job he covets, Blanche has to persuade outgoing Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy to vote yes, and without losing any more Republicans along the way.

For this reason, Republican senators have spent the last several weeks leveraging Blanche’s predicament by trying to extract various anti-abortion commitments from him in exchange for their support. Missouri’s Josh Hawley, for example, has suggested that if confirmed, Blanche should “resolve” an ongoing legal challenge to the FDA’s 2023 decision to allow telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone, which is frequently used in medication abortions. As Susan Rinkunas noted in Balls & Strikes in June, this result would be a victory for Josh, who as 2028 approaches is positioning himself as Trump’s more anti-abortion, less charismatic successor, and for his wife Erin, a conservative activist who filed one of the lawsuits that her husband, hint-hint, really hopes Blanche settles at his earliest convenience.

In its report, Politico notes that Blanche did not specify whether his comments about abortion pills were confined to mifepristone litigation, or whether he is also planning to more aggressively enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law that conservatives hope to revive as a backdoor national abortion ban. That said, given that the conservative legal movement has been fueled by anti-abortion sentiment for five decades and counting, I do not think Blanche is entitled to the benefit of the doubt here. I also think, just practically speaking, that in the context of abortion restrictions, anyone who is promising a “complete,” “permanent” victory “in every single state” is probably not going to be content with half measures.

Blanche’s frank admissions during this so-secret-it-was-on-YouTube call are consistent with the rank opportunism that has defined his career. If he had not taken on Trump as a client during a brief period when the then-former president seemed like he might be (1) done in politics and (2) looking at federal prison time, Todd Blanche would be just another generic-looking ex-prosecutor turned New York City-area law firm partner whose name you would have no reason to learn or occasion to hear. But because loyalty is the only currency in the Trump White House, just a few years later, Blanche is a few votes away from one of the legal profession’s most prestigious jobs. He will promise anything in order to secure it.

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